


Coffins

by Aizazadi



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Engagement, F/F, Gen, InterestingPOV, Plot Twists, Plotty(ish), Post-Canon, Somewhat Intellectual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 00:12:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10058438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aizazadi/pseuds/Aizazadi
Summary: What is the Matrix?Follow the white rabbit... Or the GIANT BLACK CAT, she knows too(This isn't actually about the Matrix)(At all)(Hm that just gave me an idea I might use. Laura as the One and Carm as Morpheus+Trinity anyone?)





	1. Karnstein

**Author's Note:**

> English is not my first language.  
> But it probably is yours, so no problems there. If I wrote this in Chinese why would I put all this English here, to make sure I have no readers?

Carmilla woke.

She heard someone breathing, and felt a heartbeat in her right hand.

She opened her eyes to the face of Laura Hollis, sleeping prettily and peacefully from across her, brown hair falling magnificently messy over her own face.

With her right hand, Carmilla started reaching up to part Laura’s hair, whence came a horrifying realisation:

_Oops._

_I’m holding her boob._

_..._

Civilisation dictates a time and a place for everything, lest every couple just starts up and sexing in the middle of the street. Even a newly-engaged couple (Carmilla looked at the ring on her other hand, put on when she proposed to Laura just last night) can’t be exempt, as, clearly, there is nothing wrong or awkward with some interactive boob-play before, during or after sex, or as an intimate joke, but _discovering your unconscious partner’s bare breast firmly cupped in your hand as you wake up_ , is, at the very least, reasonably unsettling.

And imagine waking her up here as you _take off your hand_. Horrifying, to someone like Carmilla, whom, extraordinarily for her age and experience, has a very thin face.

_Well at least I know why I felt a heartbeat there._

Other hand covering her eyes, Carmilla’s face distorted itself almost back to its former vampiric glory as she gingerly took her hand off Laura’s breast, bracing for the inevitable, fully expecting to hear a gasp, or a cough, when—

Quiet.  Laura’s breathing was even, uninterrupted.

Carmilla took her left hand off her own eyes, face no longer cringing.

 _Huh,_ she marvelled to herself, _the beauty sleeps._

 

Printing a kiss onto Laura’s forehead, Carmilla quietly got up and walked to the bathroom, grinning.

She froze as she walked into the bathroom, as she remembered something, as a thought hit her, as lightning struck.

That dream.

 _That dream…_ Reminded me SO MUCH of…

The coffin.

Oh God, the coffin.

The dreams…

Slowly raising her head, Carmilla stared into her own image in the mirror, realisation dawning on that much-weathered young face.

Dreams…

Dreams…


	2. Carmilla

Imagine being imprisoned in a coffin full of blood.

Imagine that blood is your only food source.

You’re a vampire, although you quite want to, you don’t actually _need_ to breath, whatever mechanism your body works by, it’s not human physiology. And so you don’t suffocate, even the discomfort of stopping your habit of inhaling and exhaling fades away after a while. You don’t need anything to eat, there is a flow in the coffin – fresh blood comes in, your excrements go out – otherwise you would’ve died of, at a rhetoric stretch, _bullshit,_ about a week into your imprisonment.

There is no actual threat to your life-after-death, the only torment is in not being able to move, and sense. The coffin and blood contains you, you can see nothing but blank blackness, and hear nothing but your constant drinking and blood sloshing around your head, you can feel nothing but the blood, and the reinforced wood of the coffin. It, together with the metre-or-so of earth between you and the world, robs you of any significant movement. You can twitch your face, twist your ankle, or slightly bend your arm, but you can’t fold your arm, you can’t lift your head, you can’t turn around. Your hands cannot touch anything other than your outer thighs, and the sides of the coffin.

Make no mistake, this is torture. Enduring an hour of this without going insane is testimony to the toughest kind of mental constitution. Although you know it’s futile, and you want to stop, you will eventually be overcome by sheer emotional reflex. You will try to twist and turn, you will send your arms and hands into the sides of the coffin in what will seem to you like desperate flailing, you will yell in agony only to be immediately silenced by the blood filling your mouth and nose. You will do your best to break free, only to exhaust yourself in the first three minutes. You will never recover this much strength again, but, in the next few hours, whenever you feel like you have _something_ back, you’ll try again, and fail again.

Until you give up.

Then, you think. You get used to not being able to move, you get used to not seeing, not hearing, and you think for a while. You think about how much you’d like to torture whoever put you here – in this case, Mother – and you come back to the realisation that you’ll probably spend your next century here; you think about how much you’d love to wander the world, to talk to anyone, to just see the sun again – and you come back to the realisation that you’ll probably spend your next century here; you think about how much you regret all your past mistakes, and how much you could give to relive all of them again – and you come back to the realisation that you’ll probably spend your next century here.

You get tired with thinking, it rips you apart every time you think.

So you sleep. So you dream. You dream of anything at all, anything that doesn’t involve you buried in a coffin of blood. However, that image is so strong in your head that you just cannot ignore it, instead you dream of emerging from the coffin. You dream of the elation of freedom, and of the confusion of discovering the changed world around you. You dream of things you had, things you wish you had, and things that barely escaped your grasp. You dream of whatever you wanted, you dream of _controlling_ whatever you wanted. You dream of stability, of peace, of friendship, of true love, of defeating Mother, of happily ever after.

So imagine my desolation at discovering myself in that exact position.

How do I know I’m not in that coffin right now? How do I know I’m not dreaming?

Answer’s I don’t. If I dream, I may for certain know I’m _dreaming_ ; but I could never be sure that I’m _not_ dreaming. But I don’t actually care about that _._ People wrestle with this every day, you _never_ know if you’re _actually_ experiencing reality, or if you’re just dreaming. You just never know, and generally, you never really suspect, you just live.

But I _was_ imprisoned in a coffin full of blood. And there is no way you don’t dream when you are there. You _have_ to escape somehow, create an alternate story, a happy story to live through…

And I don’t remember dreaming in that coffin.

 _That_ is the problem. My memories are Ell, coffin, World War II, Laura.

Laura…

I don’t care if _I’m_ real, I just want to know that _Laura_ is not my imagination. _She_ is not a fantasy.

I can’t live with the doubt. I can’t live doubting _her_ reality.

How do I find out?

I could kill myself. If I’m dreaming I’ll wake up, and if I don’t, well, then she’s real.

Win-win.

How do I kill myself?

Well, there is someone who would do it. Better yet, they’d probably only do it if I’m dreaming…

 

* * *

“No.” Came LaFontaine’s voice from within the room, right before Carmilla’s knuckles reached the door, “I will not kill you.”


	3. LaFontaine

Carmilla ought to be smart.

No, scratch that.

Carmilla ought to be _mysterious_.

The thing is, nobody’s lived for three centuries. Scientific progress hasn’t got there yet, nothing at the level of human intelligence can survive for that long. I certainly am not aware of any other vampires or immortal humanoids.

So what does happen when someone’s lived for that long?

Well, if they had a scientific outlook to the world, _intelligence;_ if they didn’t, _wisdom._

In other words, either you’re a scientist and you spend eternity conducting experiments to figure out how the world works, or you’re not and you spend eternity experiencing things. Obviously the scientist will have more systematic and applicable knowledge, but either way, what you would appear to other people is vastly intelligent.

That’s probably not right. One of the biggest intellectual conundrums in the world right now is how to get people to understand time, indeed, the apparent human incapability to appreciate million and billion-year timescales have caused for way too much undue ignorance. But even discarding that sort of length, and looking down at something like a hundred years…

A person lives and grows, their self-profile changing with society’s expectation. A twenty-year old is seen by everyone as a youngling fresh out of the nest, eager to experience the world, and in perceiving herself to be so, she does go out to seek experience and adventure. A thirty-something is more expected to have settled down, married or marrying, to have a job and stay in place, and that is indeed what generally happens with people around this age, as their total experience of the world increases, it also _plateaus_ ; they start experiencing less and less things as time goes on. An old person, say, after retirement, may be curious and adventurous once again, but they are, for the most part, _physically_ _incapable_ of experiencing the world as a twenty-something would. As you grow older and older, you gain experience slower and slower, grinding to a halt as you etch closer to your destination.

Now imagine someone living for three centuries as a twenty-year-old.

Vastly intelligent? _No._ Sherlock Holmes seems vastly intelligent, Albert Einstein seems vastly intelligent, not a tri-centenarian in a young girl’s body. She would be so intelligent, her thought processes so many levels above us, that we cannot begin to hope to follow it. Her mind will seem _random_ to us mortals, we would see her as spontaneous and unpredictable. When everything works out to her favour, all of us would still be asking ourselves how has this happened while disregarding her completely.

Carmilla would appear to us as if she’s _insane_.

There is another option, that she was actually driven insane, either by her longevity, or by her decades trapped in the coffin. Either way, the last thing she should seem to us is completely normal and comprehensible.

Yet she is exactly like that.

Yes, she’s uncaring and pessimistic, she always broods and only cares for one person in the entire world and somehow thinks that’s justified just because _she loves her_. But those are understandable perks in what’s otherwise a completely normal psyche. I’m as weird as they come in the realm of normal people, yet she is no weirder than _me_.

How?

Well, the obvious conclusion is obvious.

_She’s just acting like that._

Why? Unless she’s faking her love for Laura, which she isn’t, because she’s walked into death traps for her more times than I care to count, why would she willingly downgrade her intelligence to our level, to _my level_ , if outwitting her mother meant getting Laura safe?

_Because she knew what was going to happen._

She’s seen this before. Her literally superhuman intelligence had run a super-long simulation, probably whilst in the coffin, and, out of whatever reason, had figured out the general trend to the story if she demonstrated mortal intelligence, which ends in the same fashion as what actually happened: her mother out of the picture, she and Laura happily ever after. What she did was just following the narrative, because she knew if she had, it would lead her to that ending, to freedom and romance.

And the simulation could have run on after defeating her Mother, or it could have ended. But either way, to show her true intelligence now would risk scaring Laura off so much that Carmilla wouldn’t have dared anything other than to show gradual improvement – as if she’s actually learning.

But then, why would she be – for want of a better word – _stupid_ in the original simulation? That one’s simple, _because her_ _faculties were busy elsewhere._ She had to simulate a complicated environment, and a set of people, not the simplest of whom the Science Aid, her True Love, and her Mother, who’s supposed to be much more complex than _Carmilla herself._

But then…

_How do I know I’m not Carmilla?_

How do I know that I’m not a product of Carmilla’s simulation of the future, and she’s in the coffin _right now_? How do I know that it’s me _thinking_ , and not Carmilla?

Well, if I turn this question upside down…

If I am generated by Carmilla’s simulation of some role in the story, if she is using part of her brain as me, _why am I not generic?_ If I’m barely a functional role in the story, a NPC, and I must be, since she has no idea who anyone in the future is and can therefore have no emotional attachments to make me more than a functional role, then it makes sense to make me as _simple as possible_ , as generic as possible. And I’m not. I’m many things, but absolutely not _generic._ In fact, no-one around us is generic, in pretty much any way whatsoever.

So does that mean I’m not Carmilla?

No, it just skews the probabilities a bit. It’s like proving gods don’t exist or some similar conjuncture, you can assign as much improbability as you like to gods existing, but you can never be absolutely certain that gods don’t exist. And here I’m nowhere near that level of certainty anyway. But Carmilla does have one advantage over god. She observably exists, I can see her, everyone can see her.

 _I_ can simulate _her_. If I go at the question from her viewpoint, and I simulate her well enough, I just might come to a concrete conclusion.

Let’s do that then.

Well…

Imagine being imprisoned in a coffin full of blood.

Imagine that blood is your only food source.

 

* * *

 

“You know,” said LaF, as they sat musing on the bed, “I have a _much_ better way to find out if you’re dreaming, which this margin is too narrow… I mean you don’t even need to die for it!”

As Carmilla looked up, following LaFontaine’s gaze towards the door, there came the sound of the handle turning.


	4. Perry

It’s not that normal is _good._

It’ just that normal is… well, _normal._

And _normal_ is good.

Bear with me, it’s a bit more than a word game. Normal, you see, is the average situation, the ideal condition, the default position of some system. And, as the second law of thermodynamics puts it, the entropy, the messiness, in any isolated system tends to increase over time. In fact, the direction of progression over which the entropy in an isolated system increases _defines_ the direction of the time arrow.

In other words, chaos wins.

In other words, everything naturally gets worse.

So if you have something _normal_ , and it stays put, it doesn’t change, then it doesn’t get worse.

So _normal_ , is _good._

Well at least that’s how LaF would put it.

I’d just say that everything now is pretty normal.

And it’s pretty good.

Pretty… Good…

Well, actually the first other thing LaF would say is probably that now is _completely not normal._

I mean, the world was just about ended, and they’ve lost an eye, and between all these demonic possessions and rekindled dramatic romances and all the death and destruction and goodbyes and farewells… One hug solves it all?

Way too dramatic.

What about life before that? Normal. Everything calm, friends, family, school, home… And when we got to Silas, that was a bit weird, but not _really_ weird, not until the missing girls.

And then it's like somebody grabbed the weirdness dial and cranked it senseless. Vampires, devouring pits, dark rituals, mythical swords, ancient goddesses… Seriously.

And then the Hug, and weirdness got reset to zero?

Why, _not normal_ doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s the sort of thing you routinely see in _video games,_ books or even _TV shows._

You see, this is the other thing about weirdness, or, again as LaF would say, _the weird._ It’s only weird because you don't understand it. That is, this kind of weird stuff, _supernatural_ stuff, works by totally different rules. We’ve all read fairy tales and ancient myths and magical epics, you get attracted, excited by all the stuff you don’t know and find mysterious. That’s fine, you’re reading a book, and Dumbledore certainly knows what he’s doing. Some of the better ones even has an entire system that’s somewhat logically consistent, and you can even deduce a large part of it. But these things are written by humans, using their imagination, and human imagination of the supernatural is just nowhere close to the _actual_ supernatural.

With enough experience, you can certainly see a pattern with these things, if they happen to be vampires or witches or floor-don-possessing evil goddesses, but you can’t ever hope to _understand_ it. They might be ancient and so have almost limitless knowledge, or have brain function so potent as to transcend human thought, or, they might just think another way so deal with it. You see, the problem with _the weird_ is that _there is no guarantee they think the way you do._

Try to not think the way you think.

Then, even if they do think the way we think. Even if they have some really predictable social structure, and intelligence and emotions close enough to humans that, say, me and LaF can actually understand, and all of this we can learn in, say, 10 years, and fit into their group like Filch in Hogwarts. Granting all of that, throughout the entire ordeal, no one except Carmilla knew the first thing about them, the underworld of vampires and goddesses and mythical creatures and fantastic beasts. And, contrary to your well-trained TV senses, you don’t ever win when you don’t even know what you’re fighting, when you still call your enemy _the weird_ , when you don’t even have an inkling of what it is to win, what winning _looks like_. The only way to win _that_ situation is to nuke them. (And I’m not saying that Laura’s hug is not just about the warmest hug in the world, but…)

The Hug wasn’t a missile. It was the ultimate storybook revelation in the eleventh-hour, the magical solution that leaves everybody happy and just happens to pacify the antagonist. Even a TV show risks looking cheesy with that.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this rant.

Normal, is good.

And this, whatever this is, is not normal.

It almost feels like a _simulation._

Speaking of simulating stuff.

If you simulate being Carmilla for a second, you’ll realise…

Carmilla ought to be smart.

No, scratch that.

Carmilla ought to be _mysterious._

 

* * *

 

“Oh, hey, Laura.” Said Perry, surprised that her friend’s decided to visit her dorm room at the exact same time she was rushing there.

“Yeah.” Laura said wryly, “what a coincidence.”


	5. Laura

I am real.

Thought Laura Hollis, as she stood up from the chair, and began pacing the room, cup of coco in hand.

The December sun shone brilliantly through the window, which spanned vast from floor to ceiling, transforming the Styrian dormitory into a New York high-rise office. The ivory-coloured high-coffee table and single chair faced the window, and between the two lay a long sofa, also coloured ivory, off to the side, leaving the rest of the room empty except for a greyish soft carpet underfoot. Under the harsh sunlight which hit and rebounded off every surface in the room, everything inside melted and blended into the basic-white wall paint, creating a seemingly two-dimensional surface that rippled and swirled, much like the cup of coco in Laura’s hand.

Laura Eileen Hollis, holding the blue TARDIS mug in her hand, was the sole coloured focus in this desert of white chocolate, which drew itself around her, a whirlpool of uncertain blankness. She paced thoughtfully, eyes unseeing and ears unhearing, back to the coffee table, where she set down the mug with a soft thud.

The coco packet was nowhere to be seen.

Laura began pacing again, this time to the sofa. She sat down and forward, slowly placing her chin in her hands, as she kept on thinking:

Carmilla…

Raising her left hand, she stared at it absent-mindedly.

No, wasn’t there a ring there…

She closed her eyes.

(The sound of liquid sloshing around her head, must be the coco)

She opened them again.

A ring on her left ring finger, flashing from sunlight, appeared quite blurry to Laura’s eyes, which blinked again.

The ring grew sharper into focus, silver and brilliant, the second most beautiful thing she ever beheld.

(As the sloshing sound grew louder around her ears. Rhythmic impact)

Laura gasped, her muscles tensing from some dawning realisation. Her reflex…

_No._

_I’m real._

I’m real.

I’m real…

As her breathing calmed, Laura studied the ring on her finger.

Yeah, Carm gave me this last night. She proposed.

Last night…

Laura Hollis stopped dead in her tracks as she realised.

She didn’t think, she didn’t guess, she just realised.

_Carm’s trying to get LaF to murder her._

Right now.

So she blinked.

 

* * *

 

…Disoriented, Laura found herself in front of a dorm room staring at Perry, delivering a line that she thought only befitted Carmilla.


	6. Coffins

The door opened, and Perry and LaFontaine exchanged looks.

“We’re not real, are we” was their collective question.

Carmilla lowered her eyelids.

LaFontaine ran on:

“We’re all figments of your imagination. You’re simulating us from within the coffin, guessing what the future would look like. All of you came here at the same time, for the same reason. I thought of what you were thinking –”

“And I knew what you both thought,” interrupted Perry, “ _that_ just doesn’t happen in real life.”

“We’re all here only because _you expected us to be here_. You can only do things like that in a dream. In fact, that was my test for dreams, if you _honestly expect_ something reasonable to happen, and it doesn’t, you’re not dreaming. But that’s not our question to you, our question is —”

“—why are we _us_?” Both voices asked together, after which LaFontaine kept on:

“It just seems unbelievably redundant and random that if we’re created by your simulation, we wouldn’t be just skeletons with basic functions, instead of being fleshed out with non-generic details about the twenty-first century that you can’t possibly have guessed —”

Carmilla wasn’t listening. She was staring, wish beyond wishing, straight at Laura, who remained silent, standing across the room, and returned her lover’s fiery gaze.

Laura didn’t say a thing. She simply sent a shockwave through Carmilla’s body, as if an artillery shell exploded in the room.

_I’m real._

Carmilla ran towards her, she ran with all her strength, she ran and ran and ran, time slowing down and fading away, as LaFontaine said, to no-one’s attention:

“But then you got buried in the eighteen-hundreds and now is 2016! _She can’t be real!_ How could your simulation predict the future so accurately that you get an entire person correct _a century into the future_ not to mention that she’s THE LOVE OF YOUR LI…”

 

Carmilla woke, to the sound of earth shattering above her.

She heard blood tickling out of the coffin.

A slither of sunlight penetrated the coffin lid, she moved her arms, expecting agony. Finding a surprising amount of strength in them, she swung at the lid of the coffin.

It shattered.

Carmilla, drenched in blood, awoke from her seventy-year slumber.

She stood up, with far less effort than imagined, and braved the world. This new and mortal world, her vast hunting ground, her game board to avenge Ell, and destroy Mother.

She raised one hand onto her chest. It seemed that the habit of not breathing had taken, she was not heaving, not breathing.

Yet she heard somebody breath.

And felt a heartbeat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recommend having a think before reading on.
> 
> The story is complete up to this point. All clues have been given. Do you understand it?  
> I probably did a crap job spreading out all the relevant clues, well...  
> I love the one-sentence reveal. (Or two sentences)
> 
> The next chapter is for explanation and a happy ending's sake, which I always love. In fact, I think this story absolutely demands a happy ending.


	7. Chapter 7

Slowly raising her head, Carmilla stared into her own image in the mirror, realisation dawning on that much-weathered young face.

Dreams…

Dreams…

As she finished brushing her teeth (which, according to Laura, still reeked of her old diet, which is why she woke up early to brush every morning), she poked her head out of the bathroom door, fully expecting to find Laura still sound asleep.

Laura, sitting on the bed, was mid-yawn and half-stretch.

She pulled back fast, the grin reappearing on her face as she leaned back against the wall, audible laughter escaping her foam-covered lips.

Of course.

_Of course._

Speaking of dreams.

My life now seems just like a dream, doesn’t it? Everything I ever could hope for, in the coffin or in the real world. _Finally,_ after _so many years_ , I have freedom, love, and friendship, surrounded by people who care about me…

So, am I dreaming?

No.

Dream come true?

_No._

_The other way around._

Back in that coffin, a century ago, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed of everything that would happen in the future, but with bleak times and blank people – then I woke from that coffin, and I met these people, Laura, LaF, Perry, and others – then I dreamed again, but of the coffin, and the dream within that coffin. Except this time, I do know these people, so that they were people, and not just skeletons with functions.

I have dreamed a dream—

And now that dream has gone from me.

I’m free.

I have Laura.

Carmilla, finishing off rinsing, pulled open the bathroom door, and looked out upon the smiling Laura Hollis, happiness bright in her ancient young eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gah my ability to write emotions and people are so crap I always end up on eyes.  
> I apologise for all the mishandling of all the characters (and my Aussie English). Everyone's supposed to be a bit like Carm in this one, whereas everyone here, including Carm, ended up a bit like me, who is a bit like LaF.  
> Well my other fic, "LaFontaine's Story", is no longer the only one of it's kind.  
> Spot the Matrix reference in the last chapter.
> 
> Thanks to my unnamed proofreader, you know who you are.  
> Please comment. A lot. I want to keep writing these, but if my vanity goes unfulfilled I probably won't.


End file.
